Jeffrey D. Sadow is an associate professor of political science at Louisiana State University Shreveport. If you're an elected official, political operative or anyone else upset at his views, don't go bothering LSUS or LSU System officials about that because these are his own views solely.
This publishes Sunday through Thursday with the exception of 7 holidays. Also check out his Louisiana Legislature Log especially during legislative sessions (in "Louisiana Politics Blog Roll" below).

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12.3.13

Landrieu wish to punish oil further toughens reelection

Did Sen. Mary Landrieu commit
political suicide with remarks recently published about her willingness to end tax
breaks for oil companies?

The Democrat has walked,
successfully to date, a fine line in staying on office in a state whose people increasingly
are willing to vote on this basis of ideology, the majority of whose views
poorly fit her own expressed views. To date, she has sustained a myth that she
is a moderate Democrat when in fact she votes very much to the left: her
lifetime American Conservative Union voting record (where a score of 100
equates to a perfect conservative voting record) is barely
above 20.

Yet she has won three
elections and his gunning for a fourth, partly because she has become expert at
peeling off just enough support from those whose interests she typically votes
against, but on the most salient issues to them she sometimes backs them. One
is the oil industry, where historically she has fought attempts to increase the
tax burden on the industry, one understandably important to Louisiana.

It’s largely a myth
that oil companies get any kind of special treatment in the tax code, and
relative to subsidization in the energy sector, the industry gets far
less proportionally than does renewable energy. Yet a central tenet of Democrat
Pres. Barack
Obama’s plan to finance dramatically higher levels of spending on social programs
he has tried while in office to institutionalize rests on making carbon-based
energy suppliers pay much more in taxes.

One might expect Landrieu to
stay consistent on this issue, considering she is facing in 2014 the least
favorable electoral environment surrounding her three terms. Not only does it
appear she will compete with the highest-quality
challengers she ever has, but also, rather than having as on two occasions a
presidential top of the ticket taking advantage of favorable conditions to help
pull her to narrow victories (1996 and 2008) or be on the advantaged side of a
midterm election (2002, where the party of the president disproportionately
does worse all other things equal, with the White House then held by the GOP),
in 2014 she will be on the wrong side of the midterm tendency, exacerbated by
the fact historically candidates of the party of the president in a sixth year
of that presidency do even worse at the ballot box.

Add to that, from the
perspective of the Louisiana public, she flubbed the biggest vote of her career
by being the crucial vote to pass the Patient Protection and Affordable Care
Act that promises higher taxes, more health care expenses, and worse outcomes.
That alone will require major fence-repairing with the Louisiana electorate
which solidly
opposes it, so one would figure she would be especially attentive in making
sure she creates plenty of political cover with other issues to pick off enough
support.

Instead, she seemed to have
let her ideological slip show. In an interview
with a moderately leftist outlet on tax reform, Landrieu confirmed what she
almost off-handedly had remarked in comments
after she had voted against two bills almost two weeks ago that would have delayed
automatic spending cuts, where she had rejected the Republican alternative
because it “refused to raise any additional revenue.” Bad enough that she already
had supported a New Year’s Day tax hike (both on the wealthier and on payroll
taxes workers pay), but here she signals a desire to go after more revenue
contrary to majority opinion in the state that government spends too much that
increases only fuel.

But then she made matters
worse by fingering the oil industry as a place she would go after to squeeze
extra revenues. “This is the world – no one’s going to want to lose their tax breaks. But if
you do it fairly, I think people might grumble and complain, but you know what
… everybody has to give up a little to get to where we’re going,” she said in
explaining her view.

The problem, of course, is that the Louisiana majority does not want to go
where she wants. With vestiges of
populism still ingrained into the state’s political culture, Landrieu might
think she can get enough class warfare mileage out of these sentiments to stay
in office. Except now that she has admitted to a desire to launch warfare on an
industry that, in a bit of misperception and wishful thinking, has seen her as
its defender – which includes both big donors willing in the past to give to
her campaign to acquire protection and lower socioeconomic status workers who
could lose jobs if petroleum gets treated differentially.

Obama, naturally, wants this punitive policy in order to pursue a mistaken
and misbegotten fantasy where carbon-based energy sources are treated as a
scourge while he wastes
billions on green energy scams. Landrieu appears to have swallowed this
hook, line, and sinker now, removing an avenue of support for her and giving
opponents yet another free lane to the basket – her raising costs on health
care, raising income taxes to sustain bloated government, and now preferring
that bloated government over an important Louisiana industry.

Why did she do it? Has she just become drunk on the left’s optimistically
fundamental misreading of the political situation (no party can claim any kind
of ideological mandate when its opposition controls free and clear half of all
states’ governments while it can manage just a quarter of that, and at the
national level when it wins elections only when it is able to mobilize
sufficient numbers of low information, low interest voters on the basis of the
opposition’s fumbling on communication and turnout)? Or, after three decades in
elective office, has the necessity for putting on pretense become too much of a
burden? Regardless, she has teed up an issue for opponents to slam away that
makes her difficult path to reelection now even more treacherous.

2 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Mary Landrieu voted FOR Obamacare and NOW proposes ONE TRILLION DOLLARS IN NEW TAXES. She is a shoe-in, no way a TAX AND SPEND COMMUNIST/DEMOCRAT loses The Chocolate City, therefore Mary wins. The only way she loses is if Barack Hussein Obama moves to the Ninth Ward and runs against her, then HE wins. 5 million Communist/Democrat voters in The Chocolate City, some even still living. THAT IS WHY THERE IS NO COMMUNIST/REPUBLICAN RUNNING AGAINST HER.

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